Thank you for visiting our Website. The privacy policy is simple: we will collect no personal information about you when you visit our website. What is collected? Read on.

Information Collected and Stored Automatically

If you do nothing during your visit but browse through the website, read pages, or download information, we will not gather nor will we store anything that identifies you personally. We do collect and store the following:

• Internet domain (for example, "xcompany.com" if you use a private Internet access account, or "yourschool.edu" if you connect from a university's domain)
• IP address (an IP address is a number that is automatically assigned to your computer whenever you are surfing the Web) from which you access my website.
• Type of browser and operating system used to access my site;
The date and time you access my site;
• The pages you visit; and
• If you linked to our website from another website, the address of that website.

If You Send Us Personal Information

If you choose to provide us with personal information by sending an e-mail, or by filling out a form with your personal information and submitting it through the website, we will use that information to respond to your message and to provide you with information that you request. We do not collect personal information for any other purposes. The information you provide is not given to anyone for marketing, nor is it given to any other organizations or persons. We hate spam as much or more than anyone.

Links to Other Sites

This website has a few links to other websites. Please review their privacy policies when you visit. At the time of the creation of the web-link on these pages, the material on the target website was appropriate for visitors or their children; We wouldn't have it any other way. If you follow a link from our website to an offensive or otherwise inappropriate site, PLEASE let me know by sending an email to Alaxandar an Chobhlaigh mac Lochloinn, ( alaxandr@mountainfreehold.org ) and I will expeditiously correct the problem.

Thank you.

How the Internet Works

My server has to know this information because of the fundamental nature of the Internet. Realize that you don't actually connect to my web server as if you were making a phone call. Your browser sends a message to my server telling it what type of browser/OS you are using and a note to "Send privacypolicy.html to this IP address." My server takes the page and all of its images and sends them to you. Each piece of this puzzle has your IP address on it, as well as instructions on how each piece fits into the whole page. My server then sends all of that into the web where each piece is forwarded from node to node until you get it. Your browser puts it all together, and viola! (So you see, if that routing information weren't known to my server, you wouldn't get anything.) Meanwhile, my server makes a quick note recording which page was requested, the IP address it was sent to, the date and time, browser/OS, and referring page.

Why bother?

Why do I bother? I can use this information to help me make this site more useful -- to learn about the number of visitors to the site and the types of technology visitors use. I do not track or record information about individuals and their visits, but I might see that certain requests came back as FileNotFound errors. That tells me to fix our links or to go to the search engine that you used and tell them to fix theirs. I might see that no one has looked at the photos page and realize that I never made a link to it! Knowing which browser and OS helps in making the pages look right, since different browsers display things differently; IE has codes that Firefox won't show. If I knew that everyone showed up with Internet Explorer, I could ignore all of the Mozilla-specific code. Computers affect the webpage, too; an Apple has certain fonts that the PC doesn't, for example.